Practice Challenge

Time to get practicing! We’re kicking off our Practice Challenge!

We’re challenging all of our students to really up their practicing game!

Learning music is not easy. It requires a certain amount of work & dedication to get better. We’re always impressed with our students’ progress, and know that many of you put in a lot of hard work to constantly improve!

And now we’re challenging our whole studio to be even better! We’d like to see if you can dedicate some time EVERY DAY over the next few months towards your musical practice!

Your teacher will be giving you a Practice Challenge Log at your next lesson for you to start keeping track of your progress. Here’s what we’re asking for our students:

• For kids, practice at least 15 minutes every day.
  • Multiple instruments: At least 15 minutes on each instrument per day.
• For adults, practice at least 30 minutes every day.
  • Multiple instruments: At least 30 minutes on each instrument per day.

If you’ve practiced at least 15 or 30 minutes in a day, just check off the box on your practice log or weekly assignment sheet. For parents of our younger students, please initial the sheet each week to verify that the log is accurate.

Bring your log to your teacher each week, and for each day you’ve practiced, you get to mark it off in our Practice Challenge App in your lesson. Everyone will be able to check out each others’ progress over the next few months for a little healthy competition by looking at the leaderboards on the monitor in our waiting area.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Composer of the Week Trading Cards!

We’re also incorporating some Music History into our Practice Challenge with our Composer of the Week Trading Cards! Each week, you’ll be able to collect a LMS exclusive trading card for the composer of the week – with a new composer available every week!

• • To Earn the Composer Trading Card of the Week, you must have practiced at least 5 days for the week and filled out info on last week’s card. 
  • If you practiced 7 days for the week, you earn two Composer Trading Cards of the Week (one for you, one to trade later!).

You can trade your cards at Studio Classes or Ensemble Class Rehearsals!

And for our top practicers, we’ll have a little something special for you at the end of the challenge!

Why Are We Doing This?

Practice is an integral part of learning music. There is no way to progress or get better at music without spending time on your own learning, analyzing, and rehearsing each day. We want to highlight this important part of learning music in a fun and exciting way with a fun Studio-wide challenge!

Also, as everyone starts to practice more often and more consistently, you’ll all start to see the benefits of putting in the time. Success is its own great motivator, and once you all see the progress you can make, you’ll be excited to keep on practicing and learning!

Why those specific times? What if I practice more?

We chose the 15 minutes for children and 30 minutes for adults because they are realistic and achievable goals. They also represent the bare minimum that one should be practicing. In reality, by the time a child sits down to practice, does some of their warms ups or exercises, works on a few of their pieces for a bit, and then concludes with free improv time, that’s easily filled at least 15 minutes! For adults, we’re confident you all have enough material and things to work on to really fill your 30 minutes of practice.

And if you do practice more, great! Again the times we set are minimums, we expect you’ll all have enough material to warrant more practice time.

What if I’m traveling or away from my instrument?

If you happen to be traveling and don’t have an instrument you can carry with you (piano, drums), there are still ways to practice! You can work on note naming or music theory exercises, you can work on writing out some of your own music, you can write in and practice finger patterns or sticking techniques. There are lots of ways to practice if you don’t actually have your instrument for a day or two – just ask you teacher for specific ideas!

If I practice for an hour once a week, can I fill in four 15-minute blocks?

Nope! It has been proven that ‘practice cramming’ as we call it, does not work. The point of this challenge is to get yourself to practice more regularly. Shorter practice sessions approached more often, have been scientifically proven to be much more effective than combining weekly practice into single longer sessions.